Ripple (company)
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| Industry | Computer software |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2012 |
| Founder | Chris Larsen, Jed McCaleb |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
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Key people
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Ryan Fugger (Concept Originator) Alan Safahi (Advisory Board) David Schwartz (Chief Cryptographer) Ken Kurson (Advisory Board) Brad Garlinghouse (Chief Executive Officer) |
| Products | Ripple Payment and Exchange Network |
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Number of employees
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150 (2016) |
| Website | Ripple.com |
The company Ripple is the creator and a developer of the and exchange network. Originally named Opencoin and renamed Ripple Labs until 2015, the company was founded in 2012 and is based in San Francisco, California.
Ryan Fugger conceived Ripple in 2004 after working on a local exchange trading system in Vancouver. The intent was to create a monetary system that was decentralized and could effectively empower individuals and communities to create their own money. Fugger later built the first iteration of this system, . Concurrently, in May 2011, Jed McCaleb began developing a digital currency system in which transactions were verified by consensus among members of the network, rather than by the mining process used by Bitcoin. In August 2012, Jed McCaleb hired Chris Larsen and they approached Ryan Fugger with their digital currency idea. After discussions with McCaleb and long-standing members of the Ripple community, Fugger handed over the reins. In September 2012, Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb co-founded the corporation OpenCoin.
OpenCoin began development of the ripple protocol (RTXP) and the Ripple payment and exchange network. On 11 April 2013, OpenCoin announced it had closed an angel round of funding with several venture capital firms. That same month, OpenCoin acquired SimpleHoney to help it popularize virtual currencies and make them easier for average users. On 14 May 2013, OpenCoin announced that it had closed a second round of angel funding. In July 2013, Jed McCaleb separated from active employment with Ripple.
On 26 September 2013, OpenCoin officially changed its name to Ripple Labs, Inc. Their CTO, Stefan Thomas, further announced that the source code for the peer-to-peer node behind the Ripple payment network was officially open source. Parts of Ripple, particularly a JavaScript-based web client, had been open source months before, but the release of the peer-to-peer "full node" Rippled meant that the community now had the required tools needed to maintain the Ripple network on its own.
On 5 May 2015, Ripple received a US$700,000 (equivalent to $707,272 in 2016) civil money penalty from U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
On 6 October 2015, the company was rebranded from Ripple Labs to Ripple.
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